Network performance is typically measured either by monitoring actual traffic in a network, or by generating synthetic probes. Generating synthetic probes may involve various probing mechanisms such as probing mechanisms which use responders to reflect probe packets back to a source, after timestamps are inserted into the probe packets such that the source may compute statistics used to assess network performance.
Within a multi-site network, as probe packets are typically created on each site of the network, the proliferation of probe packets may lead to the usage of a significant amount of network resources, or network overhead, for purposes of monitoring network performance. As probing is typically scheduled at a specific time or times, probing may occur when network performance may instead be measured using actual traffic. Probing that occurs when it is possible to measure network performance using actual traffic may also result in the unnecessary use of network overhead.